Think Black
A Memoir
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
“Powerful memoir. . .Ford’s thought-provoking narrative tells the story of African-American pride and perseverance.”
–Publisher’s Weekly (Starred)
“A masterful storyteller, Ford interweaves his personal story with the backdrop of the social movements unfolding at that time, providing a revealing insider’s view of the tech industry. . . simultaneously informative and entertaining. . . A powerful, engrossing look at race and technology.”
–Kirkus Review (Starred)
In this thought-provoking and heartbreaking memoir, an award-winning writer tells the story of his father, John Stanley Ford, the first black software engineer at IBM, revealing how racism insidiously affected his father’s view of himself and their relationship.
In 1947, Thomas J. Watson set out to find the best and brightest minds for IBM. At City College he met young accounting student John Stanley Ford and hired him to become IBM’s first black software engineer. But not all of the company’s white employees refused to accept a black colleague and did everything in their power to humiliate, subvert, and undermine Ford.
Yet Ford would not quit. Viewing the job as the opportunity of a lifetime, he comported himself with dignity and professionalism, and relied on his community and his "street smarts" to succeed. He did not know that his hiring was meant to distract from IBM’s dubious business practices, including its involvement in the Holocaust, eugenics, and apartheid.
While Ford remained at IBM, it came at great emotional cost to himself and his family, especially his son Clyde. Overlooked for promotions he deserved, the embittered Ford began blaming his fate on his skin color and the notion that darker-skinned people like him were less intelligent and less capable—beliefs that painfully divided him and Clyde, who followed him to IBM two decades later.
From his first day of work—with his wide-lapelled suit, bright red turtleneck, and huge afro—Clyde made clear he was different. Only IBM hadn’t changed. As he, too, experienced the same institutional racism, Clyde began to better understand the subtle yet daring ways his father had fought back.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this powerful memoir, Ford (Whiskey Gulf) tells the story of his father's tenure as IBM's first black systems engineer. Though he was recruited in 1947 by the company's founder, Thomas J. Watson Sr., John Stanley Ford endured 25 years of racism from his white coworkers, who repeatedly tried to get him fired. "Like Robinson, my father had also stepped into a role elevating him as a symbol much larger than his individual self," Ford writes. Writing with a potent sense of outrage, Ford portrays his father as more conciliatory than he would have been when he himself was hired by IBM in 1971 and brought with him an African nationalist pride. Throughout, Ford details IBM's racist history supporting both the Nazis and apartheid, and how his father, in his stoicism, fought back against the company's racism (he obtained a document that contained answers to questions on IBM's entry exam and gave it to black applicants). Ford came to see his father as a fighter who made his life as a black man better. "Whenever I hear the blips and beeps, the whines and whirs of a computer," Ford writes, "I recall what I learned from my father about these machines, about being a man who's Black, and about being first." Ford's thought-provoking narrative tells the story of African-American pride and perseverance.
